Hahaha, well I can't stop you from making bad assumptions. When I say I believe that online portfolios are a low quality signal, I am speaking from experience. I have seen first-hand people that look amazing on paper who were bad hires, and also people who didn't invest in their online presence but were rock stars. I'd encourage you to think a little harder about what you really want out of hiring and performance reviews, and whether online material is actually what you want to be measured by. Not only is online material a low-quality indicator of someone's work performance, it's also much easier to game, in ways that are both subtle and not subtle. If you prefer that someone reads your repo checkins over talking to you, you're letting other people figure out how to make themselves look better than you with less effort. I'm not even talking about unscrupulous behavior -- when the metrics are online material, you will be competing with others' online material. People who write better will tend to "perform" better, people who produce more code will tend to look better (even though LOC is a terrible metric), and people who borrow and build on others' code will tend to look better than people who write their own.
Are you really certain these are the metrics by which you want to be judged in interviews and performance reviews?
The job I have now, thankfully, has the lowest overhead performance reviews I've had at any other job, because my team believes that annual performance reviews are not a very good system at all. We practice continuous performance reviews by working with each other and giving feedback on a regular basis. You should never be surprised by a performance review, or have to wade through the last year's work to see how someone did. If you're doing that, something is already wrong, it means you haven't been paying attention. When you have a system that reviews people annually, even if people are keeping records, it still tends to result in people changing their behavior for 1 month out of the year right before performance reviews. Doing amazing work for 10 months and then getting put on a crappy task can undo your whole year.
There is no online substitute for talking to people; it's much, much higher bandwidth than trying to read code checkins. Once someone has demonstrated they can code, I don't need to check for that again. What I need to know is why someone made the choices they did, what their philosophy about coding is, how they handle themselves during code reviews, how they work with others. I need to know what people are feeling, how they see themselves fitting in, and what their dreams and aspirations are. You can't get any of this from online portfolios, not when hiring, and not when reviewing employees.
But in terms of hiring, you as a newcomer will be jumping into a codebase and are expected to be able to work in it quickly. A symmetrical relationship for a hiring role might be to be able to find something to talk about in a candidate’s portfolio. Could even have the candidate point out the region of interest beforehand so you can have a good talk about it when the time comes. Not unlike a code review for a PR.
For new hires, I like to have an assigned mentor for the first year, it really helps ramp them up quicker, and have good material for performance reviews if necessary.
There’s nothing at all wrong with reviewing code and talking about it with the candidate/employee, that’s highly encouraged, and I do it constantly. I just can’t spend a lot of time looking at candidate’s portfolios without them being in the room, I don’t get enough information from it, and the information I do get might be misleading.
I interview extremely well. I am empathetic, gregarious and genuinely like people. I have spent my entire adult life, getting along with some of the most difficult people in the world (long story, and has nothing to do with tech), and that has helped me to get along with people from a huge range of cultures and backgrounds.
Integrity is something that I take quite seriously. I live by a very well-defined personal code of ethics. It has served me well in my career.
It seems that I am not "cut out" for today's software development culture.
If you’re experiencing issues interviewing, there are lots of things that could be going wrong. It might be the types of jobs and/or companies you’re applying for. You might be shooting slightly too high or too low for your experience level. You mentioned plainly that you’d work for not much money, that could (perhaps surprisingly) work against you if you say it in interviews. It could even be sampling noise, just an unlucky string of interviews. But I’d hire someone like you on my team...
What's sad, is that people like me used to be represented by a certain kind of recruiter, more akin to a literary agent. They'd beat the bush, and get a portion of the take from that.
Apparently, this type of job no longer exists. I suspect that the big aggregator sites, like monster.com and Hired are responsible for that.
It's been a rather sobering experience. At one time, I had to fight off people trying to hire me away from my employer, to whom I gave a great deal of loyalty. When they finally rolled up my team, I completely understood it, and supported their decision; even though it cost my team and I our jobs. They treated us well, and with great respect. I had issues with the way they did things, in many cases, but in the aggregate, it was a great experience that I don't regret in the slightest.
I've been shocked at how standard recruiters haven't shown much enthusiasm. They are the ones that get in touch with me, gushing about my résumé, then quickly backtrack, for...reasons. I know why.
I've had to concede defeat, eat a huge platter of crow and egg-on-face, followed by a dessert of humble pie. I hadn't planned on early retirement, but there you have it.
Edited to add: One other thing. I tried sites like Hired and Upwork, and the contacts I got were 100% (not 95% -100%. Not one single legit contact). scams -some, rather scary. I have heard numerous people praise these sites, but they were all people looking to hire folks; not be hired.
To be fair, many of the scams weren't predatory. They assumed that I would be fronting as an American programmer, and shopping my work out to Indian programmers (who were the ones contacting me). I suspect that some of the contractors out there may not exactly be what they say.
> Apparently, this type of job no longer exists. I suspect that the big aggregator sites, like monster.com and Hired are responsible for that.
I’ve worked with Code Talent both when building out a team and when seeking a position myself and found that they work very much like this. I haven’t dealt with them recently, but they seem to still be going strong and doing what they do. I wouldn’t hesitate to reach out to them were I look to hire or find opportunities in the Denver area. Other than as a satisfied client on both sides of the table, I have no relationship with them.
How are performance reviews done where you work? It strikes me that you have to do all the same things to see if the portfolio of work an employee has done _for your company_ is up to snuff. Because i’ve seen a few places that just offload this to some numeric ranking based on the subjective (nay, political) perceptions of one’s peers through a filter of imperfect, variable understanding of how the numbers should even work, and I hated that process just as much as I hate most interview processes. In a way performance reviews are like interviewing to keep your job or get a promotion, so I’d find your approach to hiring to be a warning about how the culture operates there.
Everything about how a person works, in your subsequent paragraph, is true. But parent is talking about their currently existing body of work, vs every stupid take home challenge to do some menial transformation of a data structure wrapped in polished UI. Not as a stand in for their personality or culture fit.